Opera mini impresses

Browsed for nearly an hour with opera mini on the QTEK 9100 mobile with "Load Images" turned off in settings. Expected a GPRS bill of something like Rs. 20-30. But it came to only Rs. 1.80! That makes it 300 kB transferred. Quite efficient, since I was browsing wired.com. Opera did not disconnect the GPRS connect even as I was reading each page, and so kept the bill down. I believe the connection times out when using IE, so each reconnect charges 30p. Ease of page navigation was also good in Opera. Small user-friendly touches like auto-flowing the text to fit screen without disturbing the general page layout and so on.

repair mysql database

Today, the Sai Inspires db showed an error,

Database error 145 while doing
query Table
'./the_name_of_our_db/si_usermessage' is marked as crashed and 
should be repaired

Solution from PB:

mysql -u root -p
mysql> show databases;
mysql> use the_name_of_our_db;
mysql> show tables;
mysql> repair table si_usermessage;

directly writing a DVD in real-time

Found that Nerovision Express (my version is 3) has the option to directly write to DVD if a video source is connected. Useful for quick conversion to DVD from any video source including firewire. Pluses and Minuses:

+ Finishes the recording in real time.

- Once you press stop, you cannot write any more into that DVD.

- No fancy menus - a default menu of Nerovision Express.

- Preset to approx 90 minutes of recording, not more.

issue with starting vnc on saiwaves

The one-line script for starting the VNC service on localhost with the required port and bit-depth would not work when I logged in with putty, but was working when I ssh'ed in with Linux! Felt the issue was with the tunnels I had defined in putty. Starting the session without the tunnels, the script works fine. If the tunnels are opened from another instance of putty also, the script "hangs". Some sort of port conflict, I guess.

leftover files from Windows update

When I found a folder feb890il9089876 or something like that in L:, thought I had been hit by a virus. But found inside the folder an i386 and an AMD64 folder, and looking at the inf file MSXPSDRV.INF and googling, found that this was a leftover from dotNET framework 3.5 update. Was able to delete with no issues since I have only one login on this machine. Or maybe it was because this was an ext2 drive and not NTFS or FAT32.

internet banking from mobile

The browsers on the QTEK 9100 mobile phone are not upto doing internet banking: Tried to pay a bill from onlinesbi.com using both IE and Opera mini, but both failed at some point during the confirmation of the transaction. Some javascript issue I believe. Bandwidth usage - if images are turned off, seeing a couple of emails on gmail or going through to the login or some other screens on the bank site use less than 50 kB, so charged at 30 paise if using Airtel's GPRS network.

printing on thermal printer with Linux

Apparently thermal printers, like dot-matrix printers, also use certain escape codes and the rest of the text is treated like "Generic Text". This experts exchange page says at the very bottom, it may be better to have the code directly in the app. And this MSDN forum post links to a pdf with escape codes. PB used the OpenBravo forum for help.

From PB's private blog,

Using EPSON TM-T88IV parallel port on ubuntu 9.04
In openbravo configuration set the printer as epson - File - /dev/lp0
To make the printer accessible by a normal user set the permissions:
sudo chmod a+rw /dev/lp0
Note: These settings are lost on reboot.
To set these permissions on boot, I added the following line in /etc/rc.local (in Ubuntu 9.04) before the exit command
# For parallel port printers add:
chmod a+rw /dev/lp0
# For USB printers add:
chmod a+rw /dev/usblp0

airflow not enough with one AHU

Today, KR tried closing a damper on one of the AHUs and using only one AHU with one compressor. Air flow seems to be not enough - the projectors in the dome ports not getting cool air, feet cool but head hot. Control panel is cool enough.

Edit: AHU is air handling unit - the big blowers for our centralized air-conditioning system.

checking for malware without getting infected

Can view pages' source by entering

view-source:http://google.com

in address bar of firefox. Nifty for a quick check for malicious code. Noscript etc are also there for javascript, of course, but I think that would not flag malicious iframes.

telescope

J brought a telescope for trouble-shooting, not able to focus. A reflector. The first problem he diagnosed himself, that was an alignment issue with the main mirror. Looking into the tube while he aligned the mirror using the screws at the back fixed that. The other problem was that he was attaching the eyepiece to a "balfour" tube and then to the eyepiece screw mount. Attached the eyepiece directly (it fit better, too) and the focus issue was solved too. Non-motorized, 72mm main mirror aperture, total magnification of around 400x, I think.

Acer Aspire One netbook

M left his Acer Aspire One netbook with me to give a graduate student. The most striking thing about it is how light and compact it is - can really carry around like a book. 1 GB RAM and 350 GB hard disk, 1.5 gig Atom processor, so it's faster than the Celeron I use in Mandir! Keyboard is a little cramped for touch typing, as all the reviews say. Can get used to it, but shifting back and forth between regular keyboards and the netbook would be difficult.

fring

Cool Edit Pro and Skype stopped working on the desktop - perhaps it was after installing DRM Removal from Giveaway of the day. Using SoundForge instead of CEP, and fring on the QTEK mobile. At first, fring seemed to have issues with sound. Sometimes it needs checking with the "fring test call" - the mic doesn't work. A bit tinny, but reasonably OK except for a nearly 1 second lag. Mainly quick and convenient, till the laptop comes back.

Edit: Confirmed that the DRM Removal was the reason for the CEP errors. Removed DRM Removal, CEP started working again. But Skype still has errors on startup.

power consumption on a Thursday

kWhr readings:

                 904         905
9.45 am         3435        15610.6
12.10 pm        3446        15685.5

trying Cisco's Linksys "iPhone" CIT200

Tested out this skype-phone - needs skype running on the computer on which the base-station is connected by USB. Voice quality just as good as any cordless (DECT) phone, has an option for speakerphone and hands-free also - 2.5 mm handsfree socket. The minus point is that it needs the PC to be on with skype running. But it's half the price of standalone wifi phones.

bridge mode on Netgear wireless router WGR614

One of my former colleagues had an issue with his Airtel broadband, wireless and his laptop - every time the power failed, he had to connect his laptop to the DSL modem directly, "repair" the connection, then connect the wireless router and so on. Airtel tech support asked him to reinstall network interface drivers on his laptop. That seemed to work - the wired network now worked without the need for "repair". Then he wanted to add the wireless router into the mix, and it appeared that disabling DHCP was the way to go. So he assigned ip addresses in the same sub-net to the DSL router's LAN interface, the Netgear's LAN interface and to the laptop's wireless interface. He was able to ping the wireless router, but not the DSL modem. Then he changed the port on which the DSL router was connected to the wireless router - initially it was connected to the "uplink" port, now he connected it to one of the "normal" 4 LAN ports on the Netgear. Now everything works. It seems this is the way to do "bridge-mode" (as against NATing) on the Netgear WGR614 - googling brought up this page which links to the Netgear KB article.

recording on windows mobile

Recording calls with the QTEK 9100 was quite simple - the recording utility works quite well if the mobile is not in hands-free mode. Speakerphone on or off, it records both sides of the conversation quite well. If recorded using the notes function, it ends up in pwi format. To convert that to wav, this page has the run-down:

1. Open the pwi file in Word
2. Right-click on the audio object speaker icon
3. Open the pwi file in Word
4. Choose Sound Recorder Document Object -> Edit -> Edit menu -> Copy
5. Open another instance of Sound Recorder, choose Paste Insert and Save As.

miscellaneous vnc problems

I had miscellaneous vnc problems with the server running Suse. Unable to use smb4k to mount windows shares and rdesktop not opening using the VNC connection. Error mesg was

rdesktop server-ip
Autoselected keyboard map en-us
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
 Major opcode of failed request: 1 (X_CreateWindow)

Thought it might have something to do with the window manager - twm and not KDE. According to this page, I could change it by editing ~/.vnc/xstartup to

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/startkde

But that did not help. Then thought it might be the colour depth. Changed the colour depth to 16 as

vncserver -geometry 800x600 -depth 16 :68

That did the trick.

Next, vncserver was getting into a loop or something when I try to run it from a putty session, but not when I run it from a terminal in Linux! This turned out to be some sort of vnc allergy to ssh tunnels - when I used putty without any tunnels, vncserver created desktops without complaints.

Then P solved the issue with smb4k:
In settings -> configure Smb4k -> super user
checked the boxes which say "Use super user privileges to mount and unmount shares", and also for 'force unmounting', gave the su pw when asked. Now it mounts.

using sed

The Cygwin install on the server running colinux doesn't have vi, so sed is useful on occasion. This useful page has the basics. String replace has the syntax

's/{old value}/{new value}/'

like

$ echo The tiger cubs will meet | sed 's/tiger/wolf/'
The wolf cubs will meet

which of course you can pipe to a new file.

The article mentions that sed can change any printable character with another printable character, but use tr instead for unprintable characters. It also discusses append and insert.

Tally caveats

For TALLY users - if your installation license misbehaves, this info might help.

The following is an extract from a long post by one of my colleagues. The full version has lots of humour, I have just extracted the "lessons".

At one of our units, the Tally installation had a few little problems since the day we installed.... It might be useful to someone who faces a similar issue or someone can tell us what we might have done better.

First, the lessons: (for those who want to move on) :
1. Keep your system date and time current before activating Tally.
2. Register at the Tally site.
3. After you activate, there is such a thing called 'Update', which you should do within 45 days. Can do offline, but nobody will tell you.
4. Don't expect good English from Tally Customer Service.

phone as bluetooth modem

Finally a lucid article in smartphonemag.com which also points to an article in smartphonethoughts.com for PC configuration gave the crucial info - the number to be entered in the dial-up networking is *99# - once this is done, everything works. Apparently this is a code which tells the mobile phone to connect to GPRS connection which has already been set up. There are other similar codes found on googling - *99***1# for example, and another is *99*1#. Maybe this means the first GPRS setting in memory or something like that. Anyway, this provides a way to dial up with the USB connection also without using the USBModem_Dialer.exe - use the *99# as the number and the USB modem as the device. But here, two caveats:

1. The Modem Link software has to be running on the mobile before the USB is connected.
2. The APN has to be entered, since Modem Link doesn't seem to remember it.

APN entering has to be a bit of voodoo, as explained at the pdagold article - it has to be entered into the modem properties. In my case, the path is different from the pdagold article - in Control Panel -> System -> Hardware tab -> Device Manager -> Modem properties -> Advanced tab -> Extra initialization commands. Here, entered AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtelgprs.com" where airtelgprs.com is my APN. Then, the normal windows dialler works.